In making dough products, it is common to introduce required ingredients into a bowl or other container and employ a mixer to automatically combine the ingredients in order to establish a mass of dough. In connection with the mass production of dough products, various different types of mixers are known, including screw conveyor systems, vertical axis arrangements and horizontal mixing devices. Each of these types of mixers have their own advantages and disadvantages. For instance, with respect to the horizontal mixing devices, removal of the dough mass after production can be extremely time consuming. In general, the bowl or tub of a horizontal mixer is generally U-shaped in side view, leaving an open section for receiving the necessary ingredients to form the dough. The tub is quite large, generally accommodating the formation of between 500-3000 lbs. of dough per batch. The tub houses a plurality of elongated mixer or kneading bars which are interconnected through spaced carrier plates such that the bars rotate in unison within the tub to perform the mixing process. In some designs, a static breaker bar may extend between side walls of the tub in order to provide an additional pinch zone for the dough during the mixing process.
With these horizontal mixers, the tub can either have a selectively opened lower discharge port or the tub itself can rotate from an upright, charge receiving and mixing position wherein the open section is upwardly exposed, to a dough removal position wherein a shell of the tub is rotated until the open section is angled downwardly. In either case, gravity is employed to aid in removal of the dough mass from the tub. However, given the existence of the mixing bars and the sticky nature of the dough itself, further operations need to be preformed to assist in the dough removal process. These operations can include manually slicing the dough at strategic locations and/or spraying the dough with oil for lubrication purposes. For instance, it is known to employ a cutting instrument, almost in the form reminiscent of a medieval axe with a cutting blade at the end of an elongated shaft, for slicing the dough along each mixer bar, thereby enabling the weight of the dough to force the mass out of the tub.
Obviously, this manual cutting operation represents hard work, requiring an overhead reaching and cutting motion on the part of the operator. In addition to being a time consuming task, this process is simply not consistent from operator to operator. Even though leaving a relatively minor amount of dough in the tub for the next batch forming process is acceptable, significantly varying the remaining amount can eventually lead to unacceptable variations in the final products produced. Furthermore, the cutting instruments utilized in accordance with the known prior art require routine sharpening, typically ranging from once every few days up to several times per each operator shift. In any case, although dough has been satisfactorily produced in this fashion for decades, a more efficient and effective dough extraction system would be quite beneficial.